Creative people from every type of medium and background want to put their content online – and when it comes to creating a website, people usually try to apply the lessons learned from their different crafts and disciplines to the process.
Filmmakers feel a truly effective website should act like a film. Novelists think a good website should be modeled after the novel. Journalists and editors feel an appealing website should have the look and feel of a magazine. The list goes on; creative types of all stripes are bringing their various experiences and backgrounds to the table – and attempting to copy and paste them on to the new terrain of the Internet.
“The Website” is still a pretty new paradigm. No one can yet say how a ‘great website’ will eventually be described or defined. It isn’t too soon to say, however, that none of these attempts at importing the criterion from other mediums will do.
Adapting the structure of movies, books, and magazines as frames of reference for a website will are doomed endeavors.
A website is none of these things.
They will fail because the optimal, ideal, and properly executed website is a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. Yes, none other than that much-maligned sub-genre of young adult fiction.
Let’s look at why this is the case. Every website is trying to do at least one of the following three things.
1.) Have you opt in for a service.
2.) Make a purchase.
3.) In the case of social websites, getting you to engage with other people.
In much the same way, Choose Your Own Adventure novels have a limited, finite number of endings that they are trying to provide to their reader.
A great example of a very well executed website is nest.com. Nest is such a great website is because it’s set up exactly like a Choose Your Own Adventure. From the moment you land on the site, it sets you on a journey. It opens with big, stunning product photography and then says: “lets walk through a couple of days of your life and how you interact with your thermostat.” The website takes you on a progressive, linear journey, in which the visitor feels themselves to be determining the next chapter of the story. Instead of giving you a confusing array of options and shot-gunning you in the face with information, nest.com puts the visitor in the driver’s seat, and lays out information in a story-format.
By contrast, the world’s worst website is that of the Massachusetts DMV. (With the exception of a few websites developed within the Obama administration, Federal Government websites are complete disasters.) The worst websites are those that have lots and lots of superfluous information that has just been thrown against a wall. This makes it extremely difficult to find the information you’re looking for, or complete the task at hand.
The Massachusetts DMV gives you all of its information on an a la carte menu, even though 99% of the people visiting that sight just want to renew their license or pay a fine. Regardless of that clear end goal, a visitor to their site gets information lobbed at their heads about virtually everything: new traffic laws, passport info, whether or not fishing licenses may or may not be valid in certain counties, etc. None of this matters! The problem is that there is no obvious narrative conclusion to the site.
If you really want to get a visitor to your website from point A to point B, you need to put a narrative path in place for them to choose and follow. You need to guide people, not hand them a cafeteria menu of options.
The DMV is an example of what I like to call The Trade Manual Approach to web design: the DMV presents their website as a technical manual; they present as much information as possible, and then leave it to the visitor to dig through the content to find what they may be looking for. The Trade Manual Approach might work with an informed audience, but a good website should never make such an assumption about their audience.
To be effective, a website needs to present a narrative journey that guides people to predetermined goals – be that a sign-up, a sale, a conversion, referral, or a renewed driver’s license – whatever the narrative option happens to be.
The best model you can have to accomplish this is the Choose Your Own Adventure book, where you have a couple of well-defined start points that make sense, and a couple of well-defined end points that make sense. The best Choose Your Own Adventure books were the one that gave you the illusion of having various, branching choices, when they were all the while funneling you down to just one or two possible endings. In essence, Choose Your Own Adventure Books really only provide the reader with the illusion that they are driving the experience- in the end, readers are being directed in whatever direction the writer intended. It doesn’t matter what you did on pg. 36 or 45 – you are still on your way towards a predetermined ending.
That is the ideal structure for a website: the designer sets up the narrative and the end results, while visitors to the site are provided with the feeling of control. Apple’s website is a great example of this. Apple’s site funnels you right into product info pages – which are great at distilling down important selling points. Every time you get through reading up on one product, there is a prompt to buy, or to keep browsing. Apple just keeps cyclically reinforcing the reasons why you should buy their products. In response you can either buy the
product, or go back to reading about how great their products are and repeat the
cycle.
With traditional novels you don’t have this option, with movies you don’t have this option, and with magazines don’t have this option. So do yourself a favor and pick the proper format: the Choose Your Own Adventure Book is the perfect blueprint for any interactive online experience.
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